> > If you are not taking a tape off-site every night, there is no need to > remove > it. Bacula can very easily handle the different backup levels. Multiple > levels and multiple tapes is no more complicated than one. That's what a > good computer program will do for you ... :-)
We always encourage clients (mostly Windows) to take the backup tapes offsite each night. That way nobody has to try and figure out if the current tape has enough space to do the next backup or not... nothing worse than having everything slow to a crawl during the day because last nights backup didn't start until the tape was put in this morning. RAID takes care of almost all disk failures, VSS takes care of accidental file deletion, Exchange can make sure emails that are deleted are still retrievable X days after the fact, and SQL transaction logs take care of stupid 'DELETE FROM tableX' statements. That really only leaves a fairly rare number of server failure modes (eg RAID controller failure that completely corrupts data - only seen that once before) and site failures like fire where the server and onsite backup takes are totally destroyed. A lot of our clients these days use LTO2 (200-400gb) or LTO3 (400-800gb) drives and a rotation of about 10 tapes (daily and weekly sets). The LTO2 drives cost about AUD$2500, and the LTO3 about AUD$5000. A 300gb USB or Ethernet removable disk costs about AUD$300, or I could build a SAN or NAS box with a tb of storage for under AUD$2000. My opinion therefore is that if you aren't taking tapes offsite each night, why bother using tapes at all when a much more convenient online backup solution could be built so cheaply! And if you are only taking tapes offsite weekly or monthly, why aren't you using removable disks? Durability is probably one answer to that question, but only if there is a significant chance of the media being dropped or really roughly handled. Of course everyone has different requirements for data retention and data loss windows. James ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
